Limitations

I took my Steel Panthers: MBT defensive theory to a painful extreme this weekend; painful in that losing sucks (my alternative was watching Diamondbacks Baseball) and it involved killing many USMC pixels. But I had to play it out to test the theory. I've been pulling off Decisive Victories on Delay Missions by totally eschewing armor units, instead flooding the battlefield with infantry backed up by generous amounts of artillery. My defeat fell mainly in the terrain I had to defend: there's no place to hide in the Sudan! My big mistake was purchasing so many engineer units; I should have seen their three-hex range Uzis would not fare well against Marine riflemen. Most of my engineers died with their guns unfired. Some lucky few huddled behind smokescreens until the jarhead M60s tried to bust through and learned that proper applications of high explosives was enough to destroy their vehicles. ATGMs were not available from the 2003 Sudanese menu (might have been a game glitch) so I was limited to M20 bazookas and Chinese recoilless rifles. Good thing I didn't have to fight Abrams tanks! With no armor to hammer, the gyrene Cobras diced up a few squads, but I had them to spare. As the map was defended wall-to-wall, he couldn't fly deep into my soft, yet crunchy rear. This didn't stop the Harrier and A-4 drivers from ignoring my SA-2 barrages and exploding my artillery parks. Sure they're old planes, but their ECM worked just great on 60s technology SAMs.

With all this going against me, I scored a Draw against the computer. While it lasted, my artillery did its job when the grunts showed up. Nine to one bodycount ratio, man. Too bad I wasn't spared a long drawn-out game by the Murtha AI that will be in the next patch. You know, the one that declares a Defeat and withdraws the moment it decides it can't win. (That's the point when I just exit the game and play something else.)

Personally, I'm considering a rematch, if I can get some better terrain than open desert. I'll leave the engineers back at home base.

Update: Much better! Got some hills to hide behind and chose Uncle Sugar's Big Green Machine as an opponent. After wasting many, many Milan ATGMs (no non-missile bug in 2006) on Stryker Picket Fences, nobody emerged from the arty barrage. Uh-oh...I knew something was up. Suddenly, the sky was filled with BlackHawks, but the chopperjockeys knew better than to overfly an infantry-saturated battlefield. You never can tell with the Americans...Not a single tank showed up. In frustration, the enemy Javelin missileers lashed out at their only legit target: the ammo containers I had stashed for my Milan shooters. Haha! Guess what, Homer! If you ain't bringing tanks, I don't need ammo for my missileers! It didn't take long for the battle to degenerate into a one-sided artillery poundfest. Theory upheld.